By Tom Hawking on
The rehabilitation of Stephen King as Serious Novelist has been in progress for quite some time now. The process started around the time his memoir On Writing was published in 2000, and gathered pace with his lifetime achievement prize at the National Book Awards in 2003.
Even then it felt well overdue, because his early work, in particular, was groundbreaking in its own way. No one’s ever going to pretend that 1970s-vintage King was a great prose stylist, but sometimes all we need from our novelists is the ability to tell a good story and tell it effectively, and from the very start, King delivered on both criteria with aplomb — never more so, in fact, than with his debut novel.
With a new film adaptation of Carrie due out this week, it seems a good time to revisit King’s debut, and marvel again at what a strange book it is.
The rehabilitation of Stephen King as Serious Novelist has been in progress for quite some time now. The process started around the time his memoir On Writing was published in 2000, and gathered pace with his lifetime achievement prize at the National Book Awards in 2003.
Even then it felt well overdue, because his early work, in particular, was groundbreaking in its own way. No one’s ever going to pretend that 1970s-vintage King was a great prose stylist, but sometimes all we need from our novelists is the ability to tell a good story and tell it effectively, and from the very start, King delivered on both criteria with aplomb — never more so, in fact, than with his debut novel.
With a new film adaptation of Carrie due out this week, it seems a good time to revisit King’s debut, and marvel again at what a strange book it is.
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